Honoring Our Past So We Can Be Clear About Our Future
Shared memory grounds, sustains and directs us in our communities and relationships, with each other and with God. Throughout the Bible, God’s people built memorials to remind them of important events. Their history and faith were expressed in stories told from generation to generation.
In continuing the legacy as our Family of Faith, we honor our past through our History Reflection process. By sharing with one another our individual and collective memories of First Presbyterian Church, we can understand who we are, how we came to be, and clearly look to our future. As we reflect on our history, we see God’s hand in, through and around the life and ministries of our church. By seeing where we have come from, we can better see where God is leading us for our future. This History Reflection process is an important part in allowing the Holy Spirit to lead us to our next installed Pastor.
Your Transition Vision Team needs input from our Family of Faith. To help reach as many people as possible, we are asking that each Elder gather information from your committees and any other groups you may be involved with. The team has prepared a short set of questions for this purpose. Additional conversations that these questions generate would be useful as well.
The questions will also be used to elicit responses via other methods, including Bulletin inserts, asking Deacons to use them during visitations, and in various meetings and gatherings.
1) In your personal faith journey, what persons, events or experiences at First Pres were an important part of your spiritual and personal growth? Please tell us about that.
2) Can you share a memory or story, about a past event or action of First Pres that leads you to be particularly proud to be a part of our church? Please be as specific as you can.
3) How did you come to attend First Pres and what keeps you here?
4) What do we do well, or have we done well at First Pres, that you would like to see continue in our future?
Please give the input from you and any in your groups to the TVT members, any of the pastors, put it in the collection plate or give it to the church office. Any of these will see that it gets to the right place.
If you have questions or other input on our History Reflection process, or any portion of the transition process, please contact Pastor John or any member of the TVT:
Curtis Porter, cporter@unm.edu
Carol Marr, Cimarroncorrals@aol.com
Judy Mead, j.w.mead@comcast.net
Kathy Yarbrough, kyarbro123@mac.com
Merri Lewis, mrlewis@q.com
Toby Smith , tobysmith68@gmail.com
John Oerter, johnoerter@firstpresabq.org